


Cheater, Cheater, Human-Eater

by melissfiction



Category: Solar Opposites
Genre: Hannibal-type vibes, M/M, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, carnivorous plant aliens, human eating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26712241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissfiction/pseuds/melissfiction
Summary: The Suburban Surgeon targets young adult brunet males in their late 20s who, Terry thinks, resemble Ansel Elgort. The best remedy for current events anxiety is turning off the news, but there are some things Terry just can't look away from. Where has Korvo been disappearing to at night?
Relationships: Korvotron "Korvo"/Terry (Solar Opposites)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	1. To Serve Man

Terry was only ever passionate about one political topic: immigration, considering that his family members were literal aliens. The type from the movies with a spaceship and deadly ray guns. He laughed at the human concept of aliens, gray balloon heads and voids for eyes always with an agenda to create an allegory for communism, because the Shlorpian concept of aliens was much different and much more accurate considering they had the means to meet aliens. Shlorpians didn’t fear invasion. Invasions were considered as natural of a disaster as earthquakes (and no, _not_ because Shlorpians considered themselves the invaders, because Shlorpians usually never seek already-populated planets) and abandoning the planet was planned from the start. Shlorpians, instead, feared failure. 

Terry’s earliest memory was emerging from the double glass doors of the nursery’s lobby, clumps of fertilizer still clinging to his feet, and noticing a magenta poster on a building across the street. He remembered thinking, _That’s the same color as my gemstone!_ , and being unable to look away like it was the fateful, fiery car crash that had stalled the freeway for hours. Even from a distance, the bold font was large enough for him to read. All caps, SUCCEED OR DIE, with bright blue shadows that made the words look as if they were meant to be viewed with 3D glasses. Shlorp had a lot of three-word adages like that, “succeed or die”, “conformity is cool”, “try harder now”, “study or else”. He used to think they were cute motivational quotes, until he grew old enough to find out what “or else” entailed. 

Despite all the colorful distractions, Shlorp was very black and white. Terry and Korvo were confused at their first parent-teacher conference when Mrs. Frankie talked about their kids’ grades—confused about what “dads” were, confused about what “kids” were, but most of all confused about the American public school’s alphabetized grading system. Korvo scoffed, called it impractical, asked what every letter stood for, then asked why teachers didn’t use numbers instead of letters if the letters didn’t even stand for anything. Some passing grades are better than others, apparently. Korvo asked why a teacher would let a student pass a class if they weren’t truly satisfied with the student’s performance, because Mrs. Frankie brought up that Yumyulack somehow got the lowest possible passing score (C-) in _all_ his classes, but Mrs. Frankie just said fuck you, that’s just how it is. Shlorpian classes were all pass/fail. 

They weren’t completely unfamiliar with being quantified by arbitrary points, though. On Shlorp, they were monitored 24/7 by the government and accumulated points over time based on the goodness of their actions. Just like the American fantasy comedy television series, The Good Place, created by Michael Schur. Normative or consequentialist, subjective or objective, merit-based or moral-based, they never quite found out, but the top 1% of Shlorpians were the ones chosen for the mission to resurrect their homeworld. The only hints they got about what would earn them the most points were in the random posters plastered on buildings and decorating the awkward beige spaces on classroom walls. 

Terry, actually, stopped fearing failure at a certain point. It must’ve been around the time he discovered drugs. That era of his life was marked by another poster he saw, in curly green calligraphy the same color as Korvo’s diamond, “perception is reality”. He remembered the panicked conversations of his classmates, trying to decipher how that phrase could possibly determine their points. The most popular theory was that whoever saw past the fog of subjective reality and into the one true objective reality would get points. And suddenly, everyone became a philosopher. Terry had a completely different takeaway. His reasoning was that, if perception is reality, then objective reality never mattered, since he would never truly see it anyway. If he could only fool himself into happiness, then even if it was but a trick of the light, he _would_ be happy. As far he was concerned, it worked. 

He developed an avoidant personality. Whatever he didn’t like, he avoided. He called it self-care. And it worked, he’s thoroughly convinced, it _worked_ and that’s why he rose to the top 1% of Shlorp, because he was the only one who figured out that green cursive hint. So, he avoided all talk of politics, except immigration. All Shlorpians were immigrants, they originated from anywhere else except the planet they currently inhabited. There must have been an original Shlorp, the one true blueprint for all ensuing Shlorps but it’s like the chicken and the egg. Who ate the other first? Something like that, Terry wasn’t sure, because he hated adages. 

Terry couldn’t tear himself away from immigration debates, just like he couldn’t tear his eyes away from those brightly-colored posters on Shlorp. That was another common fear of Shlorpians, the fear of rejection. Earth was already overpopulated, of course there was room for at least four aliens. It’s not like they were really doing anything about their overpopulation, either. But apparently, humans weren’t concerned with actual aliens, they had somehow developed racism against _each other._ Again, Shlorpians were _not_ invaders, their species was too endangered to risk any unnecessary bloodshed. They were equipped for self-defense (they had a ticking bio-weapon of mass destruction, sure, but it was mutually assured destruction, and basically useless because who knows when the Pupa will actually begin terraforming), and that was it, they couldn’t risk an entire species closing in on them. 

That’s why, every once in a while, Terry flicked the Channel 7 news on and looked out for any ICE raids. Korvo had always rolled his eyes at Terry’s penchant for current events and trends, because, after all, Earth culture would be gone when the Pupa reached full maturity. Korvo wasn’t around this time, though, which spared Terry the lecture. Terry read the ribbon of news headlines gliding across the bottom of the screen: a feel-good story about a kitten being saved from a burning building, a related story of a family of six dying by arson, a drug bust, a global warming reminder, but nothing about any local ICE raids. 

Yumyulack, who was passing by, joined Terry’s side on the couch to watch. They didn’t have much in common, but they both liked watching the news together. For completely different reasons. Yumyulack thought the best genre of violence was real-life violence, which was always all over the news. He smiled at the headline of the stabbing of a store clerk. For the same reason, he was subscribed to a number of true crime podcasts. Terry would have changed the channel, but for Yumyulack, he set down the remote on the coffee table and kept watching. 

The blonde news anchor with teeth as white as her pearl necklace introduced a study about the carbon footprint of emails. That’s right, all those unwanted newsletters and Nigerian prince scams had a carbon cost. 0.3g CO2e for a spam email, 4g CO2e for a proper email, and 50g CO2e for an email with a long and tiresome attachment. The story did a good job of guilting Terry into purging his inbox. 

“Why do humans talk about global warming so much? Just find a new planet,” Yumyulack scoffed. “I wanna hear more about the stabbing. Stabbings are way cooler than shootings.” 

“Well, it’s nice if things last,” Terry answered, as he swiped his emails into the trash. As authoritarian as Shlorp was, he still missed it. He missed Terri. He even missed those creepy posters. Yumyulack and Jesse’s generation was raised to be detached from the start, marked by a seafoam green poster the same color as Jesse’s gem that said “don’t look back”, but Terry and Korvo’s generation was old enough to have some nostalgia. It was the nostalgia that motivated their mission. 

“I’m surprised they’re not talking about—” 

The news anchor stopped in the middle of her sentence and pressed her finger to the black bluetooth headset wrapped around her right ear. “Breaking news,” she announced, struggling to maintain her pedantic tone. Her eyes were widened, her plump crimson-painted lips were contorted into a horrified grimace. “The police are investigating _another_ abduction of a young man.” A picture of a brunet man taking a bathroom mirror selfie appeared in the corner of the screen, replacing the data table of average carbon footprint per email. “This is the fifth abduction fitting a specific victim profile: a healthy young brunet man in his late 20s.” 

Terry squinted at the picture. “Y’know… he kinda looks like Ansel Elgort.” 

“You think every brunet man in his late 20s looks like Ansel Elgort,” Yumyulack argued. “You mistook the grocery shop cashier for Ansel Elgort… Well, before he was abducted, anyway.” 

“Henry was abducted?” 

The news anchor continued. “Police suspect this is the work of a serial killer. The body of the last victim, Henry Smith, was found in a construction site. Autopsy reports show that the murderer had removed the victim’s ribs.” 

Terry recalled that Korvo barbecued unusually large pork ribs for dinner last night. A completely irrelevant memory. 

“The _ribs?_ ” Yumyulack echoed. “That’s weird. The kidneys are the most valuable. Those go for a couple hundred thousand on the black market. Must be some kind of weird trophy.” 

Terry and Yumyulack simultaneously noticed Korvo coming back home from wherever he had been disappearing to, these days. Korvo was dragging in a heavy black trash bag with purple latex gloves. The gloves weren’t unusual, since Korvo always complained about getting his hands dirty, but Terry was surprised that the trash bag was black. Their family used white citrus-scented Hefty trash bags. 

“You’re supposed to take the trash _out,_ ” Yumyulack commented. 

Korvo gave a wry smile. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

Terry hated adages. They propagandized him against his will, always trying to impose some societal value on him. He was already over with his rebellious phase, already tired of resisting. Earth had much longer adages, too, and Terry didn’t care about them, either. He didn’t care whether the chicken came before the egg, he didn’t care if trash was treasure or not, he didn’t care what distance the apple fell from the tree, he didn’t care where to look on a gift horse, he didn’t care if Jack worked or played or if he was a dull boy—it was all evident of a planetary mindset, the same bullshit that convinced people that certain kinds of other people should stay on a certain side of the border. 

The thumping of heavy plastic against the hardwood stair steps paused. “Don’t waste your time with that drivel. It’s not like they’ll ever catch that cannibal.” Korvo continued the rest of his way up until he could finally shut himself into the sanctity of the ship, which he had soundproofed so that he didn’t have to listen to the downstairs television, among other unsaid reasons. 

“Huh,” Yumyulack said aloud. 

“What?” 

“Nobody ever said the serial killer was a cannibal.” 

Terry wasn’t familiar with the word, so he looked it up. Can·ni·bal, ˈkanəb(ə)l, noun, “a person who eats the flesh of other human beings.” Synonyms: man-eater, people-eater, anthropophagus, anthropophagist. Terry noticed there likely wasn’t a word to describe an alien person who ate humans; a “cannibal” was the closest descriptor. A completely irrelevant observation. 

* * *

Emotional attachment wasn’t forbidden on Shlorp, per say, but rather something that was kept behind closed doors. Holding hands with Terri in public was the Shlorpian equivalent of fucking in public. Terry, of course, rejected tradition, embraced modernity, and never hesitated to love Jesse, his precious little replicant, while Korvo had left Yumyulack unnamed for six months of their mission until he finally grew tired of reciting a specific set of numbers just to get his replicant’s attention. Korvo was traditional. Colder than the dead, dark, doom of outer space. Korvo used to avoid Terry’s touch like the plague. 

Korvo, miraculously, changed his views over time. Sharing a bed must have lowered his guard—it only took a couple nights for Terry to discover that Korvo was subconsciously, desperately, extremely touch-starved and craved cuddles just as much as he craved Diet Dr. Pepper. The most drastic change occurred after Terry’s divorce with Ansel Elgort, during those insomniac nights spent with a tissue box on his nightstand. Terry didn’t even _know_ divorces were a thing. Lifemates on Shlorp were exactly that, lovers for life, or at least until one of them died. It was a Shlorpian’s worst nightmare: rejection. 

Ansel’s trash became Korvo’s treasure. Korvo had stayed up with Terry, talked him through the whole mess, held his hand, and kept their supply of Ben & Jerry’s full. The ice castle guarding Korvo’s stoic heart was melted away by Terry’s hot tears. “How dare he?” Korvo whispered. A fiery anger lit behind the gentle concern in his eyes. “How dare he hurt _you?_ ” His last word was charged. The spark electrified them when their lips met. Terry’s heart was shocked to a crisp. He stopped crying over Ansel, after that. 

Korvo was affectionate in his own way. He was still afraid of holding Terry’s hand in public, but he made sure to stick close to Terry’s side when they walked together and let his knuckles brush against Terry’s often. He repainted the fence when Terry offhandedly complained of the ugly gray chips in the old paint. He memorized Terry’s convoluted Starbucks order: a venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato with sugar-free syrup, extra shot, light ice, no whip. Every so often, he would come home from the grocery store with a bouquet of Terry’s favorite flowers, snow-white lilies, the same flowers from his previous marriage’s wedding bouquet.

Terry appreciated Korvo’s love language, but he never quite knew how to reciprocate. After all, he and Terri had never exchanged gifts. He tried his best to compensate for his uncertainty in bed. Thankfully, it translated, and neither ever had to question the exact terms of their relationship. Terry never wanted to put a label on it—they weren’t lifemates, they weren’t husbands, they weren’t partners, their love was something purer than that. He was satisfied with never talking about it outright, as if any spoken acknowledgement would sully the whole thing, just as satisfied as he was with the mouth-watering dish Korvo had prepared for dinner. Pork loin with a Cumberland sauce of red fruits. 

Wherever Korvo got his meat from must be the same place that five-star restaurants go to. The glossy crimson sauce, though it reminded Terry of congealed human blood, tasted absolutely divine. Maybe Korvo had actually been disappearing to secret cooking classes, all this time. Terry would have suspected infidelity if Korvo’s loyalty wasn’t evident in his cooking. 

“Korvo, could you pass the mashed potatoes?” Terry asked. 

“I love you—” 

Korvo was cut off when Terry dropped his fork in pure astonishment. A dapple of red sauce splattered on the tablecloth. That three-word phrase wasn’t in the Shlorpian vocabulary. The closest equivalent was “let’s be lifemates”, which was more of a living arrangement proposal than a romantic proposal. If Terry had been chewing on something, he would have surely choked. 

Jesse, a veteran in fanfictions and romcoms and How To Get A Boy To Like You articles, was bursting at the seams waiting for Terry’s answer. Yumyulack passed the mashed potatoes. 

Terry didn’t know Korvo as well as he thought he did. Korvo had evolved so quickly, seemingly overnight, and was virtually unrecognizable to Terry now. Terry still saw Korvo as the cold-hearted engineer that talked shit about his evacuation partner behind his back. 

After a tense, pregnant pause, Terry finally replied, “Thank you.” Then, he plopped a large scoop of mashed potatoes on his plate and resumed eating. 

But then Korvo got down on one knee before Terry, produced a black crushed velvet ring box, and opened it up like a clam to show the gold band inside, adorned with a princess-cut pink diamond and two smaller accent diamonds on either side of it. The pink diamond sparkled brilliantly under the fluorescent kitchen lights. “Will you marry me, Terry?” 

Terry didn’t know people _actually_ proposed that way like they did in the movies. Ansel Elgort certainly didn’t propose to him that way. He said “let’s get married”, and then they had a drive-through wedding with a side order of fries. 

“Oh, Korvotron,” Terry said softly, as gently as he could, “I don’t believe in marriage, anymore.” 

The ring box snapped shut. 

The rest of dinner was awkward. 

Korvo didn’t join Terry in bed afterwards because he had a midnight errand that was more important than Terry explaining himself. 

Another insomniac night. 

* * *

Dinner was Korvo’s duty. Breakfast was Terry’s. 

Korvo never returned from his midnight errand, which gave Terry the freedom to keep the Channel 7 News on as background noise. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to listen for, but at least it drowned out the anxiety blaring in his head. 

“Good morning, replicants! How do you want your eggs?” 

“That was fucked up, Terry,” Yumyulack told him. Respect for elders be damned. “Seriously, what the hell was that?” 

“You broke his heart!” Jesse cried. 

Yumyulack and Jesse had clearly discussed the matter amongst themselves beforehand, and though they rarely agreed on anything, they were on the same page about their stance on Terry’s response. 

Terry decided on scrambled eggs. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He got eggs from the fridge, cracked them a little too aggressively into a mixing bowl, and tried his best to pick out the eggshells. 

“Well, tough coconuts, ‘cause we’re talking about it,” Yumyulack retorted. “I thought you two were together. I mean, you two live together, share a bed, have two kids—” 

“We _have_ to. We didn’t choose each other. We were assigned as each other’s evacuation partners arbitrarily.” Terry got to choose Terri, albeit high. Terry got to choose Ansel Elgort, albeit drunk. Terry even got to choose Jesse, albeit randomly from a batch of a hundred other replicants. He couldn’t say he chose Korvo. Korvo had been imposed on him, just like Shlorp’s propaganda posters. They were simply coping with each other until their mission objective was fulfilled. Terry loved Korvo, of course he did, but it felt ruined by the proposal. They had something good. Something simple. Something silent. Why did Korvo have to complicate it with marriage? 

“You don’t get it, do you?” Yumyulack asked. “Korvo loves you more than anything. He would kill for you.” 

“I didn’t ask him to.” 

There was a sinking feeling in Terry’s guts when he finally heard what he was listening for. The discussion of last night came to a screeching halt when the news anchor announced another abduction of a young brunet man and another previous victim’s body found, this time missing his loins. The news anchor declared a pattern of precise, intentional, methodological cuts in both found bodies. It is still unknown what the missing body parts are used for. 

Terry flicked the television off. Maybe Korvo was right, maybe it was just drivel. 

Jesse continued their conversation. “Don’t you love him?” 

“I do,” Terry answered, “but I just don’t think I can love Korvo the way he wants me to love him.” He wanted to, or at least he thought he wanted to, but there was something in the way of it. Every time he even thought about saying those stupid three words back to Korvo, it was like a chunk of Snow White’s poison apple got caught in his throat, depriving him of oxygen and suffocating him from the inside. 

Yumyulack crossed his arms. “Is this about Ansel Elgort?” 

“I’m not talking about this anymore.” 

“But—”

Terry cut Yumyulack off. “End. Of. Discussion.” 

After the replicants had breakfast and left for the bus stop, Terry drank himself to the point of drunk-texting Ansel Elgort that he missed him. He wasn’t sure why he said that, considering his number was already blocked and he didn’t actually miss Elgort, but inertia pulled him to texting more paragraphs about how he still thought of their night in that Vegas hotel room, devouring each other like a box of chocolates, whispering in sweet nothings, and that he even still imagined Ansel while making love to other people. Texting him felt as sickeningly addicting as his bottle of vodka, and rereading his typo-ridden paragraphs made him want to throw up too, but he continued texting and drinking until he was passed out in the bathtub with three empty vodka bottles perched next to the body wash bottles. 

* * *

Terry woke up, miraculously, in bed. He vomited into the conveniently placed trash bin at the side of the bed that wasn’t there before. After that, and a glass of water also conveniently placed on his nightstand, he was sober enough to notice Korvo watching him like an emetophilic creep. 

“My offer still stands,” Korvo declared. 

Terry noticed the little black box left next to the bottle of aspirin on his nightstand. He realized that Korvo really was serious. He thought that whatever meth-cocaine-shroom delusion Korvo was under would have been broken by the sight of Terry regurgitating scrambled eggs, but no, Korvo was as serious as a heart attack. 

“What is this about? Tax benefits?” 

“I love you, Terry. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Even after Shlorp gets resurrected, I still want to wake up next to you and hold you and be there for you for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” 

Fuck. Korvo had _practiced_ those vows. Ansel Elgort had to read them off a cue card. 

“What’s wrong with what we have now?” Terry begged. “Why marriage? I thought you hated human stuff.” 

“I did,” Korvo admitted, “but you changed my mind. I want to show you how much I love you. I would do anything for you.” 

“I didn’t ask you to!” Terry snapped. “I don’t owe you anything!” 

“I never said—” 

“But you _do_ think I owe you something, because you keep asking! I already told you, I don’t believe in marriage. I don’t believe in _anything_ , not in Shlorp, not in God, and especially not in marriage! It’s all bullshit. We’re living in completely different realities. You’re never going to understand me and I’m never going to understand you. So just stop, okay? If you’ll really do anything for me, you’d just _stop._ ” 

Korvo looked as if Terry had just struck him, and he may as well have. Terry sighed. He felt bad, now, so he compensated in the only way he knew how. 

“C’mere,” Terry beckoned wearily. 

He kissed Korvo, hoping that the glass of water he had was enough to wash away any leftover acidic chunks of scrambled eggs. Korvo kissed him back desperately as if it would be their last kiss (it wouldn’t), unashamed of putting all of his passion into someone who had just rejected him. Terry had always thought Korvo was the cold one, but surprise, _he_ was the cold one all along. As he unbuttoned Korvo’s robe, he briefly wondered if he should stop, but the hungry look in Korvo’s eyes answered, no, he shouldn’t. Korvo took Terry’s shirt off and got in between Terry’s legs. 

“Let me show you how much I love you,” Korvo pleaded. 

Finally, they were speaking the same language. 

“Show me.” 

* * *

Of course Terry had a favorite replicant. It was Jesse, obviously—his own flesh and blood. Jesse had an innocence sweeter than candy that Terry wanted to protect until the end of time. Innocent. Not blissfully ignorant like Terry, but truly, truly innocent. She wouldn’t even think to hesitate to love. She was selectively mute when Terry first picked her up, but Terry saw in her timid eyes that she only wanted to talk to someone who would listen to her. She didn’t have much to say, even after opening up, but Terry made sure to shut himself up whenever she did open up and listen to his replicant, his legacy, his shining hope in a cruel, dark void. 

Yumyulack was Terry’s least favorite replicant by default. 

The first thing Terry noticed about Yumyulack was his complete and utter lack of empathy. Terry thought that Yumyulack’s attraction towards animals showed a sliver of the goodwill he had been hiding all this time, until Terry found out what Yumyulack did with those animals. An early sign of sociopathy. (They were aliens, but that didn’t mean they were inhumane. Shlorpians were pacifists.) Korvo said he had no idea where Yumyulack got his violence from, he blamed the media; Terry didn’t want to think about it, it’s not like Yumyulack was his replicant anyway, so he blocked the violent TV shows and called it a day. 

He didn’t account for the history channels. Humans had wars, senseless bloodshed, witch hunts—all unheard of on Shlorp. They made for cool movies, but bad nightmares. Korvo refused to let Terry block the education channels. “It’s the culture of humanity. When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” he reasoned. Korvo loved human adages even more than Shlorpian adages. He had learned to respect human culture, at this point, while Terry was learning to fear it. 

Korvo kept disappearing, ship repairs no longer urgent. After Yumyulack was sure he heard a jingle of keys and Korvo starting the car to leave again, he began watching Channel 7 News by himself, volume off with subtitles so as to not upset Terry, all day until it was well past his bedtime. He sat through the feel-good stories, the global warming warnings, the antidepressant commercials, and the minor robberies and break-ins, all for the frown of the blonde news anchor when she declared breaking news. Her name was Lassie Nuevas, he learned. She coined the term “the Suburban Surgeon”. The Suburban Surgeon made a mistake, recently—a chunk of purple latex, presumably from a pair of disposable latex gloves, was found in the mouth of one of his victims. The material matched the brand name latex gloves sold only through Fisher Scientific, the laboratory supply and biotechnology company used by the local community college. Police suspected the Surgeon was a pre-med student looking to get a more hands-on clinical experience. 

Yumyulack was certain that the Suburban Surgeon must be a genius, not unlike himself. Maybe even more so, with how masterfully the Surgeon evaded law enforcement. Yumyulack had an entire wall of abducted humans, a three-tiered microcosm of human society, but that was for a psychological analysis with no direct murder involved. Most of the time, his abductions were subtle and didn’t make the news. The Suburban Surgeon was arrogant. All the corpses had the Surgeon’s signature on it: a body part carved out with meticulous precision. Bodies kept popping up in a more blatant setting than the last. Construction site. Dumpster. Playground. Sidewalk. The chief police officer’s front lawn. It was obvious the Suburban Surgeon was vying for someone’s attention, but who? 

“Terry’s going to get mad at you,” Jesse warned. 

“Terry’s a wuss that’s afraid of commitment.” Yumyulack had never been grounded by Terry before. Hardly even reprimanded. The angriest he had ever seen Terry was during breakfast, and even that paled in comparison to Korvo’s road rage. 

Jesse sighed. Her brother was right. She relented and sat down next to Yumyulack on the couch. “Why do you care so much about the Suburban Surgeon? You’ve killed _plenty_ more people than the Surgeon in The Wall.” 

Yumyulack shrugged. “I dunno. I feel like I know them.” 

The television cast a crimson glow on them as Lassie Nuevas preached the benefits of the antioxidants found in fruits like apples, cherries, and blood oranges. 

Jesse gasped melodramatically. “Yumyulack… are you… experiencing... _empathy?_ ” 

“Idiot,” Yumyulack sneered, but he was smiling fondly. “How the hell is empathizing with a serial killer any good?” 

“You can solve crimes,” Jesse suggested. “Just like Will Graham in Hannibal, the psychological horror-thriller television series developed by Bryan Fuller for NBC!” 

In Yumyulack’s head, a plug suddenly connected to an outlet and lit a lightbulb. “That’s the one about the cannibal, right?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Korvo called the serial killer a cannibal.” 

“Are they?” 

Yumyulack pondered it. “That would explain why the Surgeon keeps removing certain body parts, but that’s still a big leap.” 

“Geniuses make leaps.” 

If Yumyulack had access to some kind of supercomputer that could tell him all the answers—wait a second. “Why don’t we just ask Aisha? She’s had data on the entire neighborhood since the nanobots episode.” 

The television was flicked off, then they crept up the stairs and into the ship, careful not to wake Terry. Once they reached the ship, they realized being quiet was a vain effort. Terry was already awake, evident in the frustrated clanging kicks against the ship’s metal walls. He was yelling too, but it was muffled gibberish, even as Yumyulack and Jesse approached the source. He was cursing in a Shlorpian regional dialect that Terry never passed down to either of them. Yumyulack led his sister to the Pretend-o-Deck, the most soundproof room in the ship for insidious reasons. Once he reached the door, he looked for the black Sharpie dot he drew on the thinnest point of the Pretend-o-Deck’s walls. He was a reconnaissance expert. He was also nosy as fuck. This point was where Terry had a tendency to kick when he was frustrated, and he sure had a hell of a leg. 

They held their breaths listening to Terry’s yells. The pure rage sent chills down their xylems. 

“Panera Bread with 4’s instead of A’s! Panera Bread with an 8 instead of a B! Panera Bread but with those backwards Russian R’s! _Vehixflorg!_ ” 

“He’s trying to guess the override password,” Yumyulack explained. He would know. He looked through Jesse’s program history all the time. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. “Korvo must’ve changed it.” 

Terry let out a scream. “Fuck! You! Korvo!” He punctuated his words with a sharp kick to the Pretend-o-Deck wall, on the exact point Yumyulack had marked with a black dot. “What are you hiding, Korvo? You’re cheating on me, aren’t you? You’re fucking _Debbie,_ aren’t you!” 

Jesse winced at every kick. “Korvo wouldn’t cheat on Terry, would he?” She crossed her arms and rubbed at them for warmth. The ship’s metal interior was especially frigid at night, ever since the heating unit went on the fritz. 

“Are they even together still?” Yumyulack asked. 

“I…” Jesse’s voice cracked. “I don’t know,” she confessed. Her eyes began to water. 

Yumyulack panicked. He couldn’t handle it when Jesse _cried._ It wasn’t like he had empathy, of course he didn’t, he just thought she looked hideous when she cried. His heart absolutely did _not_ grow heavy when he saw tears roll down her face, it was just incredibly annoying to hear her sob. Last time she cried, she was crying for hours, all because some bucktoothed girl at school embarrassed her by going up to her crush of the day and ratting out to him she liked him. It pissed him off so badly that he knocked those beaver teeth right out of her mouth after school and now she had to wear faux teeth for the rest of her life. 

He grabbed her wrist. “Let’s go eat Ben and Jerry’s while Terry’s busy.” 

Before they could make their getaway, a hand rested on each of their shoulders. Yumyulack yelled out in surprise and instinctively shoved Jesse behind him. 

“Hey—stop screaming, it’s just me—what are you two doing still up?” Terry’s voice was hoarse, but had regained his usual obsequious demeanor. His smile didn’t betray any symptom of his earlier tantrum. 

Yumyulack was a quick liar. “We were looking for Korvo. There’s this math problem that we keep getting wrong on our online homework and we’ve only got two attempts left.” 

“Just—” Terry cleared his throat, still raw and aching. He was going to need some warm tea and Halls. “Just look it up.” 

“Isn’t cheating wrong?” Jesse asked. 

For a terrifying second, Yumyulack was scared that Terry would be fomented into another screaming fit. He squeezed his sister’s wrist, out of both fear and chastisement. 

“You’re right, sweetie,” Terry answered, with a tone so honeyed it could mollify a swarm of bees, “but people still do it.” 

Quick wit couldn’t conjure an appropriate response to that. Yumyulack was thoroughly daunted by Terry’s saccharine exterior. He preferred the Terry that cussed and kicked walls and showed real Shlorpian emotion, not this facsimile of ingenuousness. Terry must have realized they were eavesdropping. Even the Pupa had enough IQ points to realize that. 

“Well, since you’re up, I’m going to McDonald’s. Wanna come with?” Terry offered. 

Yumyulack gave a confused look. “You’re going to walk to McDonald’s?” It was clearly a peace offering, a truce to dismiss the elephant in the room, maybe even a bribe to forget about it. 

“What? No?” Terry jingled the house key and Prius car fob in the air. “We’re gonna drive, obviously.” 

Yumyulack stared up at the keychain of a gray alien head, the shape of a guitar pick, with shiny black almond eyes. Yumyulack remembered calling it a racist caricature when Terry bought it at a rest stop in Nevada, but Terry had argued that it was still cute, and besides, it was just a funny little character the humans made up because their technology was too primitive to seek real aliens besides the ones that happened to crash-land into one of their homeowner’s associations. That was the silver Prius’ key ring, alright. 

“Huh,” Yumyulack said. 

If Terry had the keys to the Prius this entire time, what were the car keys that Korvo had when he left earlier? 

He pondered on it for so long that he lost his chance at calling shotgun when the crisp midsummer night breeze welcomed them to the front doorstep. As if it were a competition in the first place. Terry always let Jesse ride shotgun whenever Korvo wasn’t around. Yumyulack was aware he was the lesser favored replicant. He concluded it was a fair choice, given how many times Terry had walked in on him dissecting roadkill. 

Yumyulack anticipated the few minutes of hesitation where Terry would adjust the seat settings, change the angle of the mirrors, and pick a radio station he liked, but all were adjusted to his personal preferences, meaning Korvo hadn’t even taken the car recently. Terry only lowered all the windows and took in a deep breath at the smell of night sprinklers watering the picture-perfect lawns. The entire blocks’ sprinklers were programmed to go off at 3:00AM every night since daytime watering would only be evaporated in the torrid August. 

In a perfect suburban neighborhood with all the houses designed by the same architect, the spaceship sticking out of their house was the only blemish. Every month, they had to pay a $50 fine for Korvo’s refusal to paint the ship the same color as the trimmings, which might as well have been 50¢ considering their gold-making machine took care of all expenses. Still, Yumyulack looked up at the miracle of Shlorpian technology jammed into the roof and thought of how the humans were taxing them for being aliens. Ruth was right, the ship was unsightly. The only time it blended in was in October, where the spooky Halloween decor gave them the excuse of adding to the haunting atmosphere—alien invasion movies were a part of the horror genre, too. 

As Terry waited at the stop sign that divided the maze of HOA properties from the main street that led down to the McDonald’s, a black SUV with tinted windows and blinding LED lights turned in. The headlights were as bright as the ethereal tractor beams from silver disk-shaped spaceships, the last light a naive human would see before they were abducted. Terry rubbernecked as the car passed by. He couldn’t look away. He expected to see a bumper sticker on the back with a three-word hint on better living (or rather, a suggestion, as he liked to think of it), but the vehicle was unmarked by anything other than the paper license plate flapping in the wind. One of the neighbors must have gotten a new car. 

Yumyulack noticed the car, too. “Lotta trunk space,” he said. 

Terry finally made the left turn out of the neighborhood. “Yeah. Korvo wanted an SUV just like that, at first, but we decided on a Prius because it’s better for the environment.” 

“You _care_ about this shitty planet?” 

“I care about humans. They already hurt each other so much. Why should we add to that?” 

Terry’s phone, mounted on the dashboard, lit up with green notifications from Korvo. Korvo was asking Terry to get him a McDouble with a Diet Dr. Pepper. The next message was a string of blood red heart emojis, not the standard bright Valentine’s Day-esque red heart that most people used, but the darker, sharper variant hiding at the back of the emoji catalog to represent the hearts’ suit in a deck of cards. 

“What difference does it make, who hurts who?” 

Instead of trying to speed through the yellow light, Terry slowed down and stopped at the white limit line. He watched the yellow circle darken and the red circle below light up. He could have made it, but oh well. “You know, I had a lifemate on Shlorp.” 

Yumyulack’s gaze shifted from the streetlights to the back of Terry’s head. Korvo spun him plenty of tales about the glory of Shlorp, the utopic marvels he and Jesse were too young to experience, the Homeric technologies lost to annihilation, but never mentioned any of his past connections to other Shlorpians. If he even had any. 

“She was perfect—smart, beautiful, funny, and very nice.” Terry smiled. “We were so deeply in love, she changed her name to match mine, Terri-with-an-I. She was too perfect, like fresh, white snowfall on a mountaintop that nobody’s stepped on. And what do you do when you get something as perfect as that?” 

“You cherish it,” Jesse answered. 

“You ruin it,” Yumyulack answered. 

Terry wondered if, all this time, he had resented Yumyulack because he saw himself in the young replicant. “That’s right, I ruined it. I cheated on her all the time. I thought I was good at hiding it, but the truth was that it was totally obvious and she just didn’t say anything. That just made me want to cheat on her even more. She still didn’t say anything. Then, I finally gave up and asked her why she didn’t stop me. I was so pissed. I was the one cheating on her, but it felt like _I_ had caught _her_ , obviously she was the one who never loved me since she never confronted me, right?” 

Terry paused. The red light was unusually long, especially considering there were no other cars in sight. The radio filled the silence: _Michelle, Michelle, you are a monster from hell._

“She told me,” Terry continued, and he had it memorized word by word, “‘You think you’re hurting me, but you’re only hurting yourself. So, I’ll let you.’” 

Yumyulack knew Terri was probably dead, but he feared her more than the Suburban Surgeon. 

“Did you stop cheating on her?” Jesse asked. 

“No, I kept cheating on her until the day she died.” 

The light went green. Terry continued driving on. Yumyulack felt like there was a moral he was supposed to have learned, but it was a riddle he couldn’t solve. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading this <3 Don't forget to SMASH that Kudos button and comment! Tell me what you liked! Tell me which dialogue lines made you laugh or cry! I love reading your comments <3
> 
> Other notes:
> 
> "Lassie Nuevas" = "las nuevas" = "the news" in Spanish
> 
> Yumyulack and Jesse adopted human culture way easier and more openly than Terry and Korvo because they go to school and have to socialize with other humans more.
> 
> All mentions of red are foreshadowing. Likewise with the color green. Red bad, green good.
> 
> Also, the thing about emails having a carbon footprint is real lol.


	2. (Ch)eaters Never Prosper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terry gives up on trying to catch Korvo. Yumyulack decides he wants to catch the Suburban Surgeon.

Korvo smelled like whole milk—fresh, innocent, straight-from-the-cow’s-teat milk. As they evacuated their exploded homeworld, they were in close quarters, so it was only natural for Terry to learn Korvo’s aroma. Terry remembered those eternal nights at the pilot’s seat, feeling the distinct warmth of a control-obsessed engineer silently hovering over his shoulder. Korvo had a way of letting his presence be known without saying a word. It could be his resting bitch face. Or, it could’ve been the inscrutable magnetism that attracted Terry to him, the fact that every time Korvo entered the room, Terry paused whatever he was doing just to look up at him. Opposites attract, after all, and they are _solar opposites._

Terry fought it. He watched Shlorp shatter in the rearview mirror (technically, a small screen showing the view of a camera placed at the rear of the ship, but same difference), and Terri along with the planet. Whoever said the world ended with a whisper, not a bang, was clearly not Shlorpian. He came up with a thousand year mourning period for Terri, an extreme, grandiose gesture so that he could finally show his loyalty to her postmortem. It didn’t last long, not with Korvo around. As hard as he ran away from his feelings, he only seemed to plummet faster towards Korvo’s gravitational core. He thought he had finally escaped Korvo’s reign when he married Ansel, but it was all a part of the scheme to make him fall deeper. 

Terry smelled Korvo, he lived with him, he slept with him, he kissed him, he fucked him, but he didn’t know Korvo. He had resigned to his un-knowledge of Korvo. Was Korvo raised by his progenitor, or left to fend for himself? Did he have a favorite color? Where was he born? Those were all questions Terry never asked and Korvo never answered. He thought knowing less about Korvo gave them a comfortable distance, maybe even an exciting spark of mystery, but the more Terry smelled Korvo, the more irresistible he was. 

He wanted to extract Korvo’s smell into a soy wax candle and light it whenever he missed him. Korvo was gone too often, nowadays, and whenever he was home, he slept. It’s true that your smell differs when you’re asleep. As Korvo slept in the middle of the summer afternoon, Terry laid behind him, held him, and took in the intoxicating scent of milk and honey. Korvo was easier to be with, asleep. Less dominating. Terry could finally look at his face without wanting to apologize, this way. With blonde sunshine tones of ochre and citrine falling on Korvo’s features, blue shadows cast in just the right places, Terry wondered why he couldn’t just tell Korvo “I love you”, why a venomous viper seemed to slither around his voice whenever he tried to muster up the courage. 

Korvo’s smell had changed, recently. Terry hated that, he hated that Korvo kept changing and he couldn’t stop it. If only he could’ve candled Korvo’s original smell, kept it in stasis and gone blind to Korvo’s incessant evolving. He was starting to smell human. The most prominent notes were bergamot and citrus—fervent scrubbing with Irish Spring. Terry knew the trick, the same strategy as spraying a can of Febreze to mask the stink of the devil’s lettuce, the same tactic as spraying too much Axe after gym class. Korvo was trying too hard to wash away the stench of touching a human too intimately. Terry could still smell the human scent underneath all of Korvo’s scrubbings. 

Terry understood his lifemate better after death, ironically. He must’ve hurt her, even if she didn’t show it. She must have laid next to him while he was asleep, just as he did with Korvo, and asked herself the same thing, why she couldn’t give him what he wanted. Terry understood her pain, now. Karma sure was a bitch. It was the pain of being a bystander to your lover’s agony. 

“My Korvy,” Terry sighed. Two years ago, Korvo would’ve stirred from slumber, but the roar of the ship’s engine blaring through outer space had desensitized him quickly. “I just hope they make you happy.” He intertwined his fingers with Korvo’s, those slim, dexterous fingers that were so steady that Terry often told him he could be a surgeon. Korvo’s hand was limp, but warm. Alive. A pulse was the only response Terry wanted. “I gave up too easily, huh? I bet you wanted a fight. You always love a good fight. But Terri let _me_ get away with cheating, so I think I should let you get away with it, too.” He held Korvo’s body closer to himself. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It means—” 

Terry paused. It was a good thing there was no way Korvo could possibly be conscious and witnessing his trainwreck of a soliloquy. 

“You know what? I don’t know what it means,” Terry admitted. Much of Terri was still a mystery. Not the thrilling, seductive kind, like the plot twist at the end of a mystery novel revealing that the serial killer had been the one he trusted the most. She was convoluted. A riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. He may never solve her, and maybe that was what she wanted from him—to discombobulate him long after her passing, as if to declare that she wasn’t a three-word hint on a street poster. She always did love those ugly abstract paintings, seemingly random paint splotches on a canvas framed in an esoteric way that spiked its value to the millions. 

“Ah, whatever it means, it _doesn’t_ mean I don’t love you, and that means I certainly, definitely, absolutely will not try and stop you. That’s what the most perfect Shlorpian in the universe did for me, so I’m just following her example.”

It was just like that saying: curiosity killed the cat. Yes, exactly like that saying. There was no second part to that saying that Terry was alluding to, whatsoever. 

* * *

The difference between Terri and Terry, besides the last letter in their names, was that Terry was far from perfect. He didn’t believe in “practice makes perfect”, either. He believed in self-sabotage and self-destruction and crashing his self-esteem to the number before zero (which isn’t -1, as humans think). 

It was sunset. The clouds outside were dyed crimson. Terry wasn’t as stupid as Korvo thought he was; he was the top 1% of Shlorp, too, and the proof was in his assignment as Korvo’s evacuation partner. He noticed that Korvo had a pattern. Every so often, the pattern changed slightly, but Terry had timed it right so that Korvo was in the middle of a new cycle. Korvo was a Shlorpian of routine, that much hadn’t changed, and he worked like clockwork—every evening, at exactly 7:06PM, he left the house while the replicants were upstairs and Terry was doing yoga with the Pupa. The yoga was a front. Terry only started yoga to give him an excuse to be in the living room and make it more subtle that he was waiting for Korvo to slip out the front door. He acted as innocuous as possible, playing with the Pupa and acting like he was too invested in his shenanigans to notice the quiet jingling of keys in Korvo’s pocket. 

Terry knew he was underestimated. It was his talent. He slipped under the radar easily on Shlorp despite being one of its most deviant criminals. Not that he was particularly diabolical or cunning, because everything was a crime on Shlorp: living, breathing, thinking a certain way, but worst of all, nonconformity. He knew how to stick out just enough to satisfy himself but not enough to risk execution. He was going to need a little extra help from a young bounty hunter he knew if he was going to catch Korvo in the act, though. 

Like any loving parent, Terry barged into the replicants’ room without any consideration for their privacy. Sweet Jesse was on her side of the room, working on her math homework, while Yumyulack was awkwardly leaning against the blank wall in the middle of the room and trying too hard to act natural. Terry noticed that Yumyulack’s side of the room was now adorned with newspaper clippings about the Suburban Surgeon, photos of all of his victims, blurbs from printed out blog posts about the Surgeon, and various sticky notes of Yumyulack’s own thoughts and theories—all connected with a crimson yarn pinned at each point like a spiderweb. Clearly, Yumyulack had been busy A Beautiful Mind-ing. 

“C’mere, you little creep,” Terry beckoned. He looked over at his favorite replicant, whose interest was piqued. He didn’t have the heart to leave her out of it. “You too, Jesse—it’ll be killer.” 

Yumyulack grinned, all toothy and eager. “We’re going to catch the Suburban Surgeon?” 

“No,” Terry said. “We’re going to catch Korvo.” 

With a jingle of his keyring acting as a pied piper’s flute, Terry led the replicants downstairs and out the door. Terry had been parking the Prius in the driveway recently so that Korvo wouldn’t be awoken by the sound of the garage opening for this fateful evening. Yumyulack instinctively resigned himself to the backseat, but Terry stopped him. 

“Sit in front,” Terry ordered. 

Yumyulack switched positions with Jesse. They buckled their seatbelts in. Now trapped in the car with the child lock on, it was finally safe to discuss their espionage mission. “What, exactly, are you expecting to find?” he asked Terry. He had a good idea of what was going on, but he didn’t want to be the first to say it out loud. 

“Nothing worse than your search history, _hey-O!_ ” Terry reached behind him for a high-five from Jesse. 

Yumyulack blushed. Guilty as charged. If only he had “Riley Reid” and “Mia Khalifa” as his keywords, like a regular prepubescent boy. His search engine listed the names of worse deviants: Albert Fish, Boone Helm, Andrei Chiktalio, Jeffrey Dahmer… Even Aisha couldn’t bear witness to the dark depths he sought. He had his own laptop, super-juiced with spare parts Korvo threw out, the Tor browser, and a strong stomach. 

“But, in all seriousness,” Terry said, “I’d like to catch Korvo cheating.” 

“I thought—” Yumyulack bit his tongue. “Never mind.” 

“That I was just going to let him?” Terry guessed. “Me too.” He started the car. “But you do other people the way you want others to do you. And if you want something done, you should do it yourself.” 

Yumyulack understood none of that. What he was going to say was, _I thought you and Korvo were over with._ Their relationship had reached a dead end, no? Terry wouldn’t commit. Korvo should have been free to find someone to fill the void. Yet, it was clear that Terry wouldn’t let go so easily. 

“What are you going to do when— _if_ you catch him?” Jesse was optimistic. The only other option was acknowledging that her dads’ relationship was crashing and burning. Life was good when they were in love. Just a week ago, she was gagging at the not-so-subtle kisses Korvo would sneak to Terry behind the morning newspaper. That moment had aged like milk and tasted just as sour under their current circumstances. 

Terry put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. “I’ll kill him, of course.” He drove to a corner just past the black SUV with the tinted windows and paper license plate, then parked the car and took the keys out of the ignition. “Yumyulack, you’re a sharpshooter, right?” He reached over to open the glove compartment. 

Yumyulack’s stomach dropped. Terry had a gun. An actual gun. Not a Freeze Ray or a Dumb Ray or a Reverse Ray or any other sci-fi alien raygun, but a .44 Magnum crammed in his glove box beside a small steel ammunition box. Despite his horror at Terry’s too-real homicidal intentions, he couldn’t suppress his boyish giddiness at the prospect of handling such an infamous human weapon. Grainy film rolls of Clint Eastwood movies projected into his mind’s eye. 

He picked up the gun. It was significantly more dense than the ray guns he was used to, which were, in essence, a piece of crystal duct-taped to plastic encasing a small laser, handmade by Korvo in a pinch and not built to endure a mere accidental slap to the floor. The weight of the magnum revolver immediately informed Yumyulack’s tentative grasp of its power. He examined the craftsmanship of the grip—genuine rosewood, the same sonorous wood that sung under yarn mallets caressing the best marimbas. He was afraid to even dare smudge the conscientiously polished barrel. “That’s… so… fucking…” He couldn’t help but squeal out the last word. “... _cool!”_ He released the cylinder and rotated it to the side to unveil the shiny bullets inside, waiting eagerly to be shot into Korvo’s skull. 

Terry pointed to a faraway streetlight with blobs of gray-feathered pigeons perched. “See that pigeon there? The one in the very middle?” He had watched Yumyulack play darts with Jesse, before. Six darts, all fanned in a circle, with all six steel tips stabbed right into the tiny red felt bullseye. Shlorp’s education system was ranked the highest in its quadrant for a reason. 

Yumyulack saw the pigeon. “From _here?_ ” he asked incredulously. Shooting wasn’t as easy as it was in the movies. Darts were child’s play. Guns, he had no experience with, whatsoever, and that’s not even mentioning the challenge posed by the obstacle of shooting from within a vehicle. He was guessing that Terry wouldn’t like it if he shot through the windshield just for a sample of his accuracy. The pigeon was straight ahead of the car. In a realistic setting, he would be leaning out of the side window in the midst of a car chase. The best shooting configuration would have to be one-handed, but the recoil... 

“You’re fucked up, Terry.” 

“You know it.” 

Yumyulack kept his seatbelt on, for stability, but pulled more belt out to allow himself to slip out from the lap belt. He kept the shoulder belt tight against his chest as he leaned out the window. As much as he loved the weaver stance, the recoil management wouldn’t do for him. But isosceles would be a challenge, too, with the car restricting his left side. There was no way around having to shoot one-handed. With his non-dominant right hand, at that. He hadn’t even finished that unit before planetary destruction. He sighed. His pride couldn’t overpower common sense, this time. He sat back down. “I can’t just get out of the car? It’s not like I’ll be shooting Korvo from this angle, anyway.” If only the Prius had introduced its sunroof feature sooner. 

Terry relented. “Fine. But if you miss, you’re grounded.” 

“ _Seriously?_ ” Yumyulack cried. He hated being the least favorite. Jesse was never asked to commit patricide. Grumpily, he unbuckled his seatbelt, left the car, and positioned himself in isosceles. He planted his feet into the concrete firmly at the proper distance, brought up the gun at the centerline of his body with his arms extended, wrist locked but elbows bent, and slightly leaned forward. He raised the gun slightly higher to his eye level. He took in a deep breath—

A bang. A flapping of gray feathers into the crimson sky, which was quickly descending its tone to the blues and indigos. A relieved exhale. 

The middle pigeon fell to the pavement below. 

Jesse’s optimism had flown south for the winter. “Can’t you and Korvo just talk it out?” 

Terry laughed at that. Talking things out was a language neither he nor Korvo spoke. He wouldn’t even trust his therapist with what he had to say. His words belonged in the day room whisperings of an asylum for the criminally asylum. 

“This is _way_ better than talking.” 

* * *

At precisely 7:06PM, Terry and the replicants ducked down and listened carefully until they heard a car door slam shut and an engine roar alive. Terry waited a few seconds before coming out of hiding, starting his own Prius, and tailing the black SUV from a distance. He could only barely make out the distinct silhouette of the back of Korvo’s head through the tinted windows. He already had the black SUV’s license plate memorized: 5C13NC3. 

The radio was off. Terry cut through a different route, a shortcut Korvo never learned, to reach the exit of the maze of HOA properties. Yumyulack’s sweaty fingers smudged the cylinder. Jesse wished she hadn’t been invited. Terry drove painstakingly slowly through the shortcut, until he saw his target approach the four-way stop. The driver waited three Mississippi’s at the stop sign despite having the clearance to roll through the intersection—it was definitely Korvo at the wheel, Terry thought. When Terry got to the four-way stop, he waited for the black SUV to make its right turn out of the neighborhood before continuing. He then quickly plowed through the intersection and the right turn to catch up. 

Jesse fiddled with her lap belt. She had never seen her progenitor this dead-focused, before. Even during a meteor shower, Terry was laughing the entire way while Yumyulack failed to suppress his motion sickness and Korvo screamed. She didn’t even think Korvo was cheating. Sure, Korvo had been coming home with an unexplained air of smugness and quiet cheerfulness despite Terry’s rejection of his proposal, but she didn’t think Korvo was the type to cheat. Korvo was too old-fashioned for that. She expected him to issue a two week notice of his resignation from his relationship with Terry rather than going through the trouble of cheating. And why not simply break up, already? She didn’t understand what Korvo and Terry were grasping onto, anymore, in their relationship. 

Occasionally, Yumyulack would give brief commands like “Change lanes”, “Pass him for a little bit”, or “Slow down”. The stalking continued all the way into the highway and after an exit. Terry wondered if Korvo was hiding another family a whole city over. Besides those commands, the car was dead silent. 

The unnerving peace, as if they were in the eye of a hurricane, continued until Yumyulack counted one, two, three, _four_ right turns. “He’s spotted us!” 

The black SUV began racing down the empty streets. Terry stepped on the gas pedal, _hard_. The Prius strained under the pressure, but was able to warm up enough until they spotted the black SUV with the paper license plate again. The SUV was seven seconds’ distance away and approaching a bridge that was about to divide in the middle and fold up. Their target crashed through the red-and-white candy-striped beam of the bridge barrier and was able to speed through the bridge just in time to make it before the bridge began folding up. Terry stomped harder on the gas pedal until it was floored all the way. 

Yumyulack and Jesse shrieked in unison as the Prius made the leap into the air and they didn’t stop shrieking until the car crashed heavily, but in one piece, onto the other side of the bridge and down the incline. 

“Just talk it out, Terry!” Yumyulack begged. “W-W-We can get you guys couple’s counseling! You guys can work it out!” 

Terry made a beeline through the downtown traffic as he followed the black SUV, swerving expertly through cars and trucks and narrowly avoiding motorcycles without so much as a scratch on the side mirrors. He and his target ran several red lights. Yumyulack and Jesse shrieked simultaneously, again, when a pickup truck nearly T-boned them. 

“I wanna go _hooo-ooome!_ ” Jesse pleaded. 

“Home is where the heart is!” Terry told her. 

Jesse wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but she was sure that Terry was using it wrong. “My heart _isn’t_ in this car!” 

The black SUV slowed down, made a three point turn, then made a right turn around the corner of 8th and Victoria. The SUV was heading towards the long road down to the corn fields. Terry smirked. He knew downtown better than Korvo—he was the one who did all the shopping for their replicants in the fashion district. He made a left turn and sped until he reached the bridge, which he jumped. Below, he narrowly missed crashing his car right on top of the black SUV. Terry was hot on his target’s tail. The driver must have thought he had lost them, obviously, with how slow the SUV was going. 

“Yumyulack, shoot!” 

Yumyulack did not do well under pressure. His hands were shaky. He leaned out the window and shot twice one-handed at the black SUV, but the bullets went straight into the trunk. The SUV started to speed back up again once the driver heard the gunshots. “I can’t shoot like this!” he yelled at Terry. His grip and stance were all wrong, and the recoil nearly slipped the gun out of his sweaty hands. “Get parallel to him!“ He felt a warm, prickly sensation on the top of his head, the telltale warning of incoming gooblering. 

Terry took the lane left of the black SUV. Yumyulack had a clear shot of the dark silhouette inside the SUV. He held the gun high at eye level, arms stretched out and locked out of anxious sloppiness. The tint on the black SUV’s windows was too dark. His own reflection of his terrified expression and shaky stance was aimed right back at him. 

“I-I-I _can’t!_ ” he sputtered. He lowered the gun. Gooblers were popping out of the window and splattering into purple goo under the wheels of two cars that decided the speed limit was the least of their worries. “Terry, I-I can’t do this! What if he’s not even cheating? W-Wh-What if he’s just preparing a special birthday surprise for you?” His stutter was genetic, its source being the Shlorpian he was trying to shoot, but he had worked through hours of speech therapy and reading poems out loud to suppress it. The last time his stutter came out was when he was bullied at his first year of the academy for being off-colored. 

Terry yanked Yumyulack down. “My birthday’s already passed!” He snatched the gun out of Yumyulack’s hands and shot one-handed out at his own reflection without hesitation. He missed, only by a few centimeters. 

The black SUV’s tinted window shattered completely. Inside, the driver stared helplessly back at Terry. 

“ _Tyler?”_ Terry exclaimed. As a hollowness dug a cavity in his chest, Terry felt as if he were collapsing in on himself, like a dying star. He was sure Korvo was in that car. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Korvo had a pattern that lined up exactly with the comings and goings of that exact car. He had observed Korvo for two weeks, two weeks of acting oblivious to Korvo’s innocent act, but he was at square one again—no knowledge of what Korvo was up to. 

“What do you _want_ from me, man!” Tyler yelled out. 

Terry raised the gun for a second shot, anyway. He felt as if a puppet master were pulling the strings on his arm up. The puppet master was telling him that the hollowness would go away if he pulled the trigger. Terry was furious at Tyler. He felt as if Tyler took Korvo away from him, as if Korvo was cheating with Tyler, against all common sense. His madness convinced him that if he got rid of Tyler, it would bring back Korvo. He was sure that he was tailing Korvo, he was _sure_ of it. 

“Terry, w-wh-what the fuck? No!” Yumyulack dove for the steering wheel. “W-What happened to caring about humans?” He swerved the Prius into the black SUV. 

Sparks flew. Terry lost control of the wheel, as did Tyler of the SUV’s momentum. Both cars veered off the road and into the cornfield. 

After an ear splitting screech and a cloud of dust, Terry came to, a few rotations of skid marks away from Tyler’s car, where Tyler hung upside-down. The corn stalks around them were flattened. Good thing they were all wearing seatbelts. Terry coughed dryly. 

“You guys good?” he asked. 

Yumyulack released himself from his seatbelt and promptly vomited out the window. The digested chunks of PB&J uncrustables splattered to the ground below. He then collapsed back into his seat, then into his hands. He sobbed and screamed. His quaking small frame shrunk in on itself even smaller. There was a large blue gash on his head. 

In the backseat, Jesse was hyperventilating. “N-No!” she answered. “We are totally _not_ okay at all!” Her fingers were locked in a death grip of the ceiling handle. 

Gooblers from both Jesse and Yumyulack were intermingling and dancing frantically all over the interior of the car. 

Terry wasn’t sure why he expected a positive response. He unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car to check on Tyler. He faked a bright smile. “Heeey, Tyler! Haha, funny story—I mistook you for my cheating partner!” If only he brought the “ _Wait, What?”_ memory-erasing ray gun. Anyone could get away with anything with the memory-erasing ray gun. That was why Shlorp only made the cheap kinds, with effects so shallow a mere flipping through a shoddy scrapbook could restore an entire lifetime’s worth of memories. The trick was to shoot someone with the Dumb Ray _and_ the memory ray to get the best effects. Even a cheap memory gun would suffice for a mere human, though. 

Tyler, shell-shocked and numb with blood rushing to his head, laughed maniacally. He paused as if he were about to say something, but only laughed harder. “I don’t know how the _fuck_ you fooled everyone else, but I’ve been on to you from the very start! I know exactly what you are!”

Terry scratched his head. “Is… this about me being an alien?” Terry wondered who shot Tyler with the Dumb Ray 10 times. 

“Don’t play games with me,” Tyler hysterically laughed out. “ _You’re_ the Suburban Surgeon.” He raised his hands up (technically raised them down, since he was upside-down) in surrender. “I give up, already! What do you want from me? My fingers? My feet? My kneecaps? Or are you gonna cook me alive in your communist alien stew?” 

Terry felt compelled to join in on Tyler’s laughter with his own awkward chuckling. “Uh, haha, that’s pretty funny, but no. Shlorpians don’t eat humans.” The communism thing was an entirely different conversation that Terry wasn’t prepared for. He was a bad Pupa Expert, not a bad economist. “I have never, ever, in my entire life, eaten a human being. Whoever the Suburban Surgeon is, is certainly, definitely, absolutely _not_ Shlorpian.” Besides that, Tyler was blond. He didn’t fit the Suburban Surgeon’s profile. 

While Terry went back to his car to fetch his insurance card, he double-checked Tyler’s license plate. For insurance reasons, of course. 

The license plate was R3DHRNG. 

* * *

After getting a ride back home from the tow truck driver, the replicants immediately limped their way up to their room in silence. The smell of sizzling meat lured Terry to the kitchen, where Korvo, in the frilly green apron he was given for Christmas as a gag gift, was in the middle of preparing dinner. Korvo looked Terry’s bloody and ragged body up and down and turned the stove off. 

“Long day?” 

Terry nodded. 

Korvo went up to him and kissed him on the cheek as a consolation prize for whatever Terry had just come from. “Tonight’s dinner is ‘Boudin Noir’ from Ali Bab's Gastronomie Pratique.” 

Terry decided that he would take a crack at talking things out. “If you were cheating on me, would you tell me?” 

“Of course not.” 

“Good,” Terry said. “It’s not cheating if you’re never caught, and what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” He sat down at the table. “So, please, don’t hurt me.” 

“Of course not.” 

Terry glanced at the crimson tubules of red meat gushing out from the meat grinder on the counter. He recognized the delicious smell in the air. It was the same smell he smelled under Korvo’s Irish Spring. “Hey, Korvo, you’re not the Suburban Surgeon, right?” 

Korvo smiled.

“Of course not.” 

Terry hoped that the adages on Shlorp applied on Earth too, because he dearly needed his warped perception to be reality. He no longer wished to save Korvo from debauchery. He could hardly save himself. 

* * *

Yumyulack held an ice pack to the top of his bandaged head as he looked over the denizens of The Wall. He tried coming up with a catchy name for his tiny people’s society, something equally as catchy as the Suburban Surgeon, but he was no Lassie Nuevas. The Wall would have to remain The Wall until inspiration striked. He sat cross-legged on the carpet and watched the lower level as he meditated on the feeling of pointing a cold gun at his own reflection. At that moment, he suddenly understood “innocent until proven guilty”. The happenstance contemplation of innocence saved his mirror image from shattering, and thus, saved a man’s life. 

He had a denizen he liked to check up on. He didn’t play favorites because he knew favoritism would blind him to his overall objective of observing the microcosm of human society, but for a few minutes, he let himself go blind and watched that particular denizen. It was the waiter that happened to be wearing a red shirt, the last color of the ROY G. BIV rainbow in his colored shirt collection of denizens before he committed to adhering to a vague moral code—happenstance had cursed him, regardless of guilt. 

Yumyulack witnessed that man, once a greenhorn, harden into a rebel well-versed in the ransacking patterns of the lower levels’ gangs. Every occasional skim through the levels was a new chapter of development for Red Shirt. That was when Yumyulack realized the limitation in his experiment; he was only an outside observer looking in, deaf to the contents of individual interactions. And isn’t that what society came down to, an abstract amalgamation of interactions and experiences that, in moments of clarity, conveyed overarching themes? Yumyulack designed the experiment to learn those themes and got what he asked for—he would never _know_ that man, only the themes that constructed the paradigms for that man’s worldview. His journey, from greenhorn to rebel to beacon of hope to tyrant, would go unrecorded because of a design flaw. 

Yumyulack couldn’t remember when he decided his purpose was to observe human society. He never had a hypothesis in the first place, just a Shrink Ray and a whim to reenact the Twilight Zone episode _Stopover in a Quiet Town_. He brushed it off, called science an improvisation, and continued his compulsive collecting. He thought he would understand human adages better, those moments of clarity in society’s madness that warned him of mistakes like assuming guilt before innocence, but in hindsight, he had the subject all wrong. He was studying a new civilization, not injecting rats with chemicals and timing their race through a maze. He was an armchair anthropologist when he should’ve been partaking in participant observation. 

Jesse sat down next to her brother, on her knees. She could only focus on schoolwork for so long after such a traumatizing event. Korvo and Terry may not see a couple’s counselor, but she and Yumyulack would surely need their own counselor. “Are you re-thinking the Wall?” She could practically see Yumyulack’s heart, doubled in size after refusing to shoot who they thought was Korvo and then saving Tyler’s life. “It’s not too late to let them out.” She only hoped to be the shoulder angel that could convince him to do the right thing. 

Yumyulack put his ice pack down and shook his head. “‘Don’t look back,’” he recited. Shlorpian adages were further ingrained in him than any human adage could ever be. Shlorp’s education system was ranked the highest in its quadrant for a reason. 

Yumyulack’s mind kept replaying the memory of Terry not hesitating to shoot his self-image or abandon his philosophy of altruism. He saw what Terri meant when she said, _“You think you’re hurting me, but you’re only hurting yourself_ ”, as soon as Terry’s reflection shattered. He solved the riddle that was Terri and Terry’s relationship as lifemates, why they fit together like puzzle pieces. Terri let Terry hurt himself until the very end, and likewise, Terry allowed himself to hurt until the very end, till death did they part—it was because they were perfect for each other, perfectly _toxic_. 

They satisfied each other’s vices. They spoke a hate language, not a love language. They suffered the most pleasurably in their relationship. It was the love affair between an addict and an enabler. When Terry shot at who he thought was Korvo, Terry thought he was rectifying his past conundrum of never being punished for his adultery by serving justice to someone he thought was cheating on him, but all Yumyulack saw was another relapse into toxicity. Terry was only hurting himself again by trying to hurt someone else, driving himself mad with jealousy over Korvo’s unproved guilt. 

“Well,” Jesse argued, “you can just look forward to a future where you _do_ let them out.” 

“Just so they could get slaughtered by the Suburban Surgeon? Or some amateur copycat?” Red Shirt was a young brunet man, maybe toughened by his experiences in the wall, but also probably no match for a highly intelligent psychopath. Yumyulack would be serving Red Shirt to the Suburban Surgeon on a silver platter. “They’re probably safer in there, at this point, if things stay the same.” 

“But you don’t want things to stay the same,” Jesse stated. She could see Yumuyulack’s “Beautiful Mind” at work. They shared a look. Jesse smiled at him. She knew exactly what he was thinking: he wanted to catch the Suburban Surgeon out of genuine concern for humans. She wiped a fake tear from her eye. “Yumyulack… you really _are_ experiencing empathy!” 

“Oh, shut up. If you were on a trolley that would kill either one bad person and twenty good people, you would obviously choose to kill the one bad person.” Yumyulack glared at the hopeful light behind his sister’s eyes. “Not that I care about bad people or good people! It’s not like human standards of morality apply to us. We’re higher life forms. Running over twenty people, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, is bad for the trolley.” 

“That’s not how the trolley problem goes. It’s either a few of your loved ones or a bunch of strangers you don’t know.” 

Yumyulack stood up. “Whatever, I don’t care about trolleys _or_ humans. It’s just inconvenient for my work that some asshole is eliminating so many potential test subjects.” He looked into his reflection in the Wall. It was a lot easier to look at himself without a gun pointing back. 

“Uh-huh. Sure. Totally objective.” Jesse held out her hand to be helped up, then Yumyulack helped her up. She was impressed by his progress. Two years ago, he would've helped her up, only to push her back down. One year ago, he would’ve told her she was being lazy. A couple months ago, he would’ve helped her up but under the false pretense that it was so she wouldn’t “bitch at him and come crying to Funyulack”. She was sure that helping Yumyulack catch the Suburban Surgeon would be a gateway to him eventually setting the Wall People free. “So, how are you going to catch the Suburban Surgeon?” 

“We can just ask Aisha who the Suburban Surgeon is, remember?” They were close to finding out, last time, until they were sidetracked by Terry. Terry was already fast asleep, this time. “And after that, we can just use our advanced alien technology to track them down and catch them. It’ll be easier than math homework.” 

Jesse, who still had fifty geometry problems left to do, resented that comparison. “It’s only easy for you because you cheat.” 

They went up to the ship, but the lights didn’t automatically turn on upon entry. They were hit by an abnormal stillness that made them hyper-aware of every rise and fall of oxygen into their lungs. Tinnitus buzzed in Yumyulack’s auditory canals once he entered the dead silence. They already knew Aisha was offline without even bothering to call out to her. Yumyulack lit up his phone’s flashlight, but didn’t continue down the cold metal corridor. 

“Everything’s off. Should we just forget it?” Yumyulack had no idea how to turn the ship’s power supply on. He regretted not going to Korvo’s Taco Tuesday nights. 

Jesse noticed a bright cyan glow under a door at the end of the corridor. “Look.” She pointed at the glow. “Something’s still on.” 

As they approached the door, the temperature dropped rapidly. It was always cold in the ship at night, but never to the point of white clouds of condensation puffing out of every exhale. A chill overcame them as if they were in the belly of an arctic ghost with liquid nitrogen as digestive fluids instead of hydrochloric acid. Yumyulack dragged his finger on the metal wall and scooped up a smidgen of frost. The source of the coldness seemed to be the room with the cyan glow emanating through the door cracks. 

When they reached the door, it struggled to slide open. The sliding metal tugged at its icy restraints over and over until it finally broke free from the glue of coldness. Jesse and Yumyulack covered their eyes from the blinding cyan light on the other side of the door. There were bright cyan lamps hanging from the ceiling over two rows of tables with opalescent pools of liquid in ivory bowls, shimmering with what looked like dark red flecks of an unknown solute. When Yumyulack’s eyes adjusted, he shut off his phone light and peered into the bowls. Some of them had bunches of sharp, multicolored shards growing in all directions from the bottom of the bowls. Yumyulack flinched as a few shards grew in his direction. 

“Korvo’s growing crystals,” Jesse said. She peered into a bowl with larger crystals with distinct obelisks, much larger and much more pure than the crystals used for their ray guns. The flat sides of the crystals gleamed pink, yellow, and blue from different angles. She marvelled at the red fluorescence of the solute in the liquid. She didn’t remember much from her crystology class, but she knew that the red specks were the result of notoriously expensive chemicals imported from a previous iteration of Shlorp. “It’s for the memory erasing gun. It has to be grown in intense cold temperature, so that’s probably where the ship’s power is going.” She tried to feel the glassy edge of one of the crystals, but as soon as she touched it, it shattered. She flinched away. “These crystals are really fragile. I don’t think Korvo has figured out the right ratio of chemicals, yet.” 

Yumyulack shivered. “Cool.” No pun intended. “Well, let’s go. This stuff is completely irrelevant.” 

Jesse relented her curiosity about Korvo’s sudden interest in memory erasing crystals and left the room with Yumyulack. The door slammed shut behind them. The warmth of her bed beckoned her, away from any suspicion of Korvo and from their pursuit of the Suburban Surgeon. 

A distant moaning or perhaps some creaking of the ship’s metal panels stopped Yumyulack in his tracks. Jesse, lost in a daydream about hot chocolate, bumped against Yumyulack’s back. He hushed her and listened closely. It was much fainter, but he heard it again. He knew a dying animal’s cry anywhere, but he couldn’t place the species. The ship often had unwanted intruders, mainly being raccoons that traveled through the vents, but Yumyulack expected tiny footsteps, the distinct sound of claws and padded feet pittering on titanium. 

Hot chocolate and warm blankets would have to wait. When Yumyulack was curious, he stopped at nothing to find his answers. Jesse followed him down the corridor, into a few inky black twists and turns only saved by the white light of his phone flashlight. Yumyulack noticed that the rest of the ship never warmed down to room temperature. There was another source of coldness and instinct told him that’s where he would also find the source of the strange noise he heard. They went in circles, sneaking around with rolled steps to minimize their sound. Yumyulack cursed their lungs. It would be easier to hear any hints of the creature lurking in their ship if not for their incessant breathing. Especially Jesse’s—it was all _gasp!, gasp!_ and he could practically hear every oxygen particle echo against every crevice of her esophagus as she exhaled. 

Yumyulack looked down at his phone screen. Banners of green texts from Terry summoning them for dinner were still unread and uncleared. His battery had a sliver of red in its white outline—1%. 

“Oh shit,” Yumyulack whispered. “I think we should—”

He watched the white light go off. Stupid iPhone battery. He swore he was at 70% just an hour ago. They were in pitch black, now—darker than the darkness behind their eyelids. Yumyulack couldn’t remember the last time he was in complete darkness. Even at night, their room was always brightened by the light pollution outside their window. On Shlorp, the trees were luminescent with flowers glowing magenta and pollen sparkling iridescent gold. Even in space, the expanse of twinkling stars and the hum of the ship’s engine kept their dull search for a new planet alive. They were in that same ship now, the ship that used to be lively with the banter of Terry insisting they ask for directions and Korvo stubbornly arguing that he knew where he was going, yet neither of them could feel a twinge of familiar comfort in the dead blackness besides each other’s body heat. 

Yumyulack took Jesse’s hand. He expected her to get lost in a heartbeat, probably to do something stupid like attempting to make friends with a rabid raccoon. He took it upon himself, as the older, wiser, and smarter of them, to lead them out of the hunk of Shlorpian technology back into the solace of their primitive Earth house, where humans thought it was appropriate to place the receptacle for excrement next to the stall in which they cleaned themselves. (Gross. The toilet and the shower should be in separate rooms.)

Jesse tugged his hand. “We should retrace our steps out of here.” 

“No, I know a shortcut.” Yumyulack tugged her forward. 

She slipped out of Yumyulack’s grasp. “You’ve been leading us in circles this entire time. I don’t think you know where you’re going.” 

“I was trying to listen for the weird noise! Just follow me, retracing our steps will take for—” 

A loud thump interrupted him. There was an obvious weight behind the noise, as if a limp body had fallen to the floor. Yumyulack started towards the direction of the thump, to the left, tracing his fingertips against the walls to feel his way around. He turned a corner, which he assumed to be the hallway towards the specimen room if he had correctly kept track of their whereabouts. He followed the hallway to its end, waiting for his fingers to hitch on a ridge on the right side that should be the door to a storage closet, then ended up walking straight into a wall. He groped around for any ridges on the wall, hoping that the hallway was only shorter than he initially thought, but it was a dead end. 

Yumyulack had no idea where he was. “It must’ve come from a hallway over.” 

He waited for Jesse to scoff and call him out on his awful sense of direction, but his words merely dissipated into silence. He reached his hands out in front of him into empty space. 

“Jesse?” 

No response. 

“Jesse, you idiot. You don’t split up! That’s how you die in a horror movie.” 

There was still no response, but talking out loud made him feel less creeped out. 

“If the Suburban Surgeon were on this ship, you’d definitely be dead without me to protect you. It’s pretty gross watching people die from this auto-kill suit, but at least it keeps me safe.” He made his way out of the hallway. “Well, except from you and Terry and Korvo. But those are the only people that have access to the ship. Not the Suburban Surgeon. So, I’m totally safe from the Suburban Surgeon. Unless...” 

Yumyulack decided it was time for him to shut up. He was glad nobody was around to witness his trainwreck of a soliloquy. There was no chance the Suburban Surgeon could be Jesse, Terry, or Korvo. He was freaking himself out for no reason. 

Yet, he didn’t stop himself from retracing his path and hoping he would find Jesse along the way. He wasn’t scared. Of course not. He was just looking out for her because Jesse was vulnerable, probably scared and alone with no idea where she was, unlike him, who was the solar opposite. She would probably have to sleep in Korvo and Terry’s bed tonight to feel safer, something he was definitely not guilty of. 

As he headed down the corridor where he came from, he heard heavy footsteps from the same direction he heard the thump from. It wasn’t Jesse. He quickly slipped back into the dead end where he came from, thinking that the unknown figure would pass by him without a second thought. Logically, the figure had to be Korvo, but there was a presence Yumyulack felt that filled him with the utmost dread. He imagined it would be the same feeling he would get if he were being haunted: a terrible, overwhelming sense of doom that coated you like a slimy membrane. A dominating, unconscious realization that you are in danger, as if an entity was whispering threats right into your mind. 

The footsteps came to a halt. Yumyulack covered his mouth and slowly stepped backwards. The footsteps followed him into the hallway just as slowly. Yumyulack continued stepping backwards. He could feel the unknown figure looming over him, practically walking him off a plank into the depths of hell. He tried to picture Korvo in front of him, but he could feel the killing intent radiating off of the figure. He swore he felt rage, silent, yet so much louder than the rage of Terry screaming his lungs out, scorned by the thought of Korvo cheating on him. He felt as if he were being hunted for meat. 

The closer the figure got, the stronger Yumyulack could smell a metallic aroma, a horrid, sickeningly sweet smell. It was the same smell he remembered from washing the bottom of his shoe after stepping on a tiny human that accidentally got free before he could put him in the Wall. 

All logic was gone—Yumyulack knew the Suburban Surgeon was the one in front of him. He just _knew_. 

At the end of the hallway, Yumyulack’s back hit the wall behind him. He was cornered. The heavy footsteps stopped. He and the unknown figure stood there in silence. It was enough time for Yumyulack to have his entire life flash behind his eyes, but there was no flashback sequence or list of regrets that came to mind. All Yumyulack could think of was that he lost whatever sick game he didn’t know he was playing. 

Suddenly, Yumyulack was grabbed by the shoulders. He let out a high-pitched shriek. 

“Jesse! What are you doing here in the dark? It’s dangerous.” 

“K-K-K-Korvo?” Yumyulack stuttered out. 

“Oh. Yumyulack. What are you doing here?” 

Yumyulack felt a noticeable shift in demeanor. He knew he was Terry’s least favorite replicant, but hearing the subtle disappointment in Korvo’s “Oh” made him wish the Suburban Surgeon had caught him instead. Getting murdered would’ve hurt less. 

“I-I was just… I-I wanted t-t-to—” Yumyulack cleared his throat and started over. He wasn’t a first-year academy student getting shoved into lockers, anymore. He mentally recited the old poem he used to practice in front of a mirror for hours. 

_A night, a street, a lamp, a drugstore,_

_A meaningless and dismal light._

_A quarter century outpours –_

_It’s all the same. No chance of flight._

_You’d die and rise anew, begotten._

_All would repeat as ever might:_

_The street, the icy rippled water,_

_The store, the lamp, the lonely night._

Yumyulack tried again. “Me and Jesse were gonna ask Aisha something, but everything is off. And then we heard some weird noises.” 

“Ah, right. I’ve been trying to save electricity so that we kill the planet a little less. Humans already hurt the planet so much. Why should we add to that?” 

“What difference does it make? The damage is already irreparable at this rate.” 

Yumyulack remembered a picture of a blazing red sun in the corner of the TV screen, disproportionately close to Earth, as Lassie Nuevas recounted all the ways global warming was dooming the planet: melting glaciers, rising sea levels, disappearing islands, migrating penguins. 

“That’s true,” Korvo admitted. “It’d be more efficient to kill off all the humans and let nature run its course.”

Yumyulack waited for a “but”, a profound exception Korvo would name off that would plead for Yumyulack to change his mind or some mysterious anecdote with a vague ending that would have Yumyulack thinking for hours about what the moral was. It never came. He shouldn’t have expected humanity from a Shlorpian. He had to make up his own “but”. 

“But killing is wrong?” Yumyulack tried. 

Yumyulack half-expected Korvo to laugh in his face. He could almost see the outline of Korvo’s wry smile. 

“There’s no such thing as right or wrong,” Korvo answered. “There’s only getting in trouble if you’re caught. So? Don’t get caught.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fall quarter is beating the shit out of me but somehow, I've mustered the strength to write a new chapter! My challenge writing this story is, "How painfully obvious can I make it that Korvo is the Suburban Surgeon without outright saying it?" You gotta love the dramatic irony. Also, if you haven't noticed, I love parallelism. 
> 
> The poem at the end is a Russian poem by Alexander Blok.


End file.
